What difference does it make? The nature and significance of theistic belief

Ratio

Volumn 19, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 401-420

  Cottingham, John ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF READING   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 43249153306     PISSN: 00340006     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1467-9329.2006.00337.x     Document Type: Article

References (41)

1. Quoted in B. Davies, Aquinas (London: Continuum, 2002), p. 74.
2. An important exception to the standard linkage between theism and metaphysics is the recent 'postmetaphysical theology' typified by the work of Jean-Luc Marion (which, however, approaches these issues from a very different angle). See Marion's Dieu sans l'être [1991] transl. by T. Carlson as God without Being (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991),
3. the excellent essay by Carlson, 'Postmetaphysical theology' in K. Vanhoozer (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Postmodern Theology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
4. It is interesting that such an assumption is often so ingrained as to be retained irrespective of what is actually asserted by defenders of a theistic position. To cite but one small example, a recent otherwise highly acute and discerning discussion of my On the Meaning of Life managed in one respect to misconstrue the argument, by automatically assuming that it must be resting the possibility of a meaningful human life on the existence of an immortal soul - whereas in fact a commitment to afterlives and souls is not invoked anywhere in the book. See Thaddeus Metz, 'Cottingham and Baier on the Meaning of Life', Disputatio, Vol. I, no. 19 (December 2005), pp. 215-228.
5. Cf. J. Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life (London: Routledge, 2003).
6. See David Benatar, 'What's God got to do with it?' (present volume);
7. nd edn. (London: SCM, 2001).
8. Rudolf Carnap, 'The elimination of metaphysics through logical analysis of language' [Überwindung der Metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der Sprache, 1932].
9. First published in Erkenntnis, vol. II. Trans. Arthur Pap, in A. J. Ayer (ed.), Logical Positivism (New York: Free Press, 1959), p. 79 (emphasis supplied).
10. Michael Stocker with Elizabeth Hegeman, Valuing Emotions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. 94.
11. Cited in Mark Wynn, 'The relationship of religion and ethics: A comparison of Newman and contemporary philosophy of religion', Heythrop Journal, 2005.
12. See also M. Wynn, Emotional Experience and Religious Understanding: Integrating Perception Conception, and Feeling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).
13. Mark Wynn, 'The relationship of religion and ethics'.
14. See J. Cottingham The Spiritual Dimension (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), Ch. 5.
15. For these various virtues and vices, see Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics [c. 325 B.C.], Bk. IV, esp. Chs 2, 4, 7.
16. Psalm 130 [129]:5-7.
17. Job 1:4.
18. Romans 8:38.
19. Romans 4:18.
20. Psalm 42 in the Vulgate.
21. E. J. Wielenberg, Value and Virtue in a Godless Universe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 110, 112.
22. Wielenberg, Value and Virtue, p. 139.
23. (quoted in A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley (eds), The Hellenistic Philosophers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 25 J).
24. The adjective anhypopton in the second sentence means literally 'unsuspected', or (in this context) 'nothing to be suspicious about, nothing to worry about'. An alternative version has anaistheton - 'nothing to feel in death' or 'death is total unconsciousness' (cf. Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 124, in Long and Sedley 24A). I say that Epicureanism was 'to all intents and purposes' atheistical because there is scholarly controversy over the sense in which the School may have allowed the existence of the 'immortals' or 'gods'; but at all events they were held to be of no relevance to human life.
25. th edn 1909).
26. In Kant's gesammelte Schriften, Akademie edition (Berlin: Reimer/De Gruyter, 1900-), 5:161.
27. Psalm 19[18].
28. Cf. Richard Norman, 'The Varieties of Non-Religious Experience' (present volume).
29. 'I see these frightening expanses of the universe that shut me in, and I find myself stuck in one corner of this vast emptiness, without knowing why I am placed here rather than elsewhere, or why from out of the whole eternity that has gone before me and the whole eternity that will follow, this one tiny period has been given me in which to live out my life. I see only infinities on every side which shut me in like an atom, like a shadow that lasts only an instant . . .' (Je vois ces effroyables espaces de l'univers qui m'enferment, et je me trouve attaché à un coin de cette vaste étendue, sans que je sache pourquoi je suis plutôt placé en ce lieu qu'en un autre, ni pourquoi ce peu de temps qui m'est donné à vivre m'est assigné à ce point plutôt qu'à un autre de toute l'éternité qui m'aprécédé, et de toute celle qui me suit. Je ne vois que des infinités de toutes parts, qui m'enferment comme un atome, et comme une ombre qui ne dure qu'un instant.) Blaise Pascal, Pensées [c. 1660], ed. L. Lafuma (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1962), no. 427.
30. Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows [1908] (London: Penguin, 1994), Ch. 7.
31. Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey [1798], in S. Gill (ed.), William Wordsworth: a critical edition of the major works (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), lines 89-100.
32. For further discussion of the philosophical significance of this passage, see J. Cottingham, '"Our natural guide . . .": Conscience, "nature" and moral experience', in D. S. Oderberg and T. Chappell (eds), Human Values; New Essays on Ethics and Natural Law (London: Palgrave, 2005), pp. 11-31.
33. L. R. Kass, The Hungry Soul: Eating and the Perfecting of Our Nature (New York: Macmillan, 1994), pp. 228-31.
34. See further J. Cottingham, On the Meaning of Life, pp. 97ff.
35. A worldview which fits neither in this 'no-nonsense' camp nor in the theistic category is the Buddhist religion, which (in its prevailing form) is non-theistic, yet finds an important place for spiritual praxis. In a recent study that is highly sympathetic to the Buddhist outlook, David Cooper speaks of forms of Zen praxis as 'allowing things to be experienced as the "gifts" they are'. (A Philosophy of Gardens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 158). It is unclear, however, how a framework of interpretation that views the world as an impersonal flux could find a genuine place for the kinds of affective response associated with, for example, saying grace: it is significant that Cooper feels obliged, in the passage just cited, to put the word 'gifts' in inverted commas.
36. See Cottingham, The Spiritual Dimension, esp. Chs 1, 6 and 7, for a development of this theme.
37. Compare Paul Moser, 'Cognitive Idolatry and Divine Hiding', in D. Howard-Snyder and P. K. Moser (eds), Divine Hiddenness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), pp. 126-7: 'God can be all-loving in supplying evidence of God's existence in a manner sensitive to human receptivity to filial knowledge of God. We have no right to demand evidence of God's reality that fails to challenge us to undergo volitional transformation towards God's character. So God's hiding from a casual or indifferent, inquirer does not count against the reality of God's existence'.
38. Exodus 33:20.
39. Blepomen gar arti di esoptrou en enigmati (1 Corinthians 13:12).
40. Letter to Mersenne of 27 May 1630.
41. See Pascal, Pensées ed. Lafuma, no. 418.